Books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers is best known as the author of his classic poetry collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, which has been translated into nine languages. In 1998 he was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco. He is also a prolific translator, editor, essayist and the author of a novel, Love in the Days of Rage.

Ferlinghetti's writing often reflects his views about politics and social issues of the time, and the artist's role in the world. Here is a complete listing of Ferlinghetti's currently available titles, including his most recent full-length collection of poetry, Time of Useful Consciousness (New Directions, 2012). His newest chapbook-length books came out in 2014: Blast Cries Laughter (New Directions) and The First and the Last of Everything (Sore Dove / Bottle of Smoke).

Check back for updates in 2015 on the progress of Ferlinghetti's forthcoming book of travels journals, soon to be published by Norton/Liveright.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus. Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic—a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true...

A blow-by-blow unearthing of the places where the Beat writers first came to full bloom: the flat where Ginsberg wrote "Howl;" Gary Snyder's zen cottage in Berkeley; the ghostly railroad yards where Kerouac and -Cassady toiled; the pads where Jack &...

A new, shorter collection by America's preeminent living poet and social activist, who is just as fiery and provocative as ever at 94 years old.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast, published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound...

A million copies in print—translated into over a dozen languages—one of the best-selling and most popular books of poetry ever published, now available in a new hardcover edition containing a CD of the author reading his work. Ferlinghetti is a...

An Elegy To Dispel Gloom
[After the Assassinations of Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco and City Supervisor Harvey Milk November 27, 1978]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Signed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 1978. Folded broadside, one of only 50 copies of the second printing (marked 25 cents) after a first printing of 50 copies (marked 15 cents). Photocopies made by Ferlinghetti at the Postal Instant Press in San Francisco. Minor toning to the edges, else a fine copy of this very scarce item.

A Far Rockaway of the Heart is Ferlinghetti's sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind, written forty years afterwards in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year. A sequence of one hundred and one poems with...

"A surreal semiautobiographical blackbook record of a vagabond period in my life, in that mindless, timeless state most romantics pass through, confusing flesh madonnas with spiritual ones." – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life." For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just thatilluminating both...